Miniature Quilt-making Workshop and Performances – Ellen Yiu, Meghan Clarke, Romy Day Winkel
Saturday 29th June 2024
Location: Zone2source
This event centred around the making and maintenance, use and decay of material; following the passage of time that accompanies textile pieces and the processes of crafting them. We began with a workshop led by Ellen Yiu, followed by two performances by Meghan Clarke and Romy Day Winkel, respectively.
Miniature Quilt-making Workshop with Ellen Yiu
Ellen lead a Miniature Quilt-making Workshop. The practice of Ellen Yiu cannot be easily categorised. Much of her work relies on slow craftsmanship, but she also uses found objects. She works with extensive installations and makes miniature handcrafted sculptures. There is a certain inbetweenness in her work that is reflected in the diversity of materials that she uses, such as paper, textiles and wood. She processes her personal experiences and memories in her work, focusing on themes such as identity, healing and cultural connection. The workshop was an introduction into a particular process of her practice, in which she taught techniques, such as patchwork and quilting, on a miniature scale.
Between Was And Am – Performance by Meghan Clarke
Meghan Clarke presented Between Was And Am, an audio performance that uses the act of unravelling and embroidering a piece of fabric as the rhythm, and forum, for storytelling. The work explores the feeling of being in-between the two places the artist calls home, and the way her use of language has changed as a result. During the performance, a sonic landscape is crafted by deconstructing and recomposing a collection of sound and written material - field recordings, piano compositions and poetry. The work is informed by the oral and musical traditions that bind textiles and telling tales.
]bracket – Performance by Romy Day Winkel
Romy Day Winkel presented the installation and performance ]bracket, which revolves around Anne Carson’s Sappho translations in ‘If Not, Winter’ (2002). Due to lack of sufficient conservation, parts of Sappho’s original manuscripts have been destroyed. Carson leaves these missing pieces of papyrus into the text via adding brackets, which Winkel in turn connects to the shape of a foot on its toes. By walking through the installation while wearing silk socks with wooden rings in them, Winkel provokes a slow destruction of the socks, which raises the question: is it at all possible, and even desirable, to avoid destruction? What happens if we instead embrace it, mark it, like Carson did with her brackets?